In recent weeks, a handful of people asked me what’s been happening in Web Components Land. Well, as President of Web Components, I have good news and the state of Web Components is pretty strong right now.
I did my Frontend Masters course on Web Components in April and since then there’s even more positive momentum happening in the Web Components space. Here’s a high-level list of developments over the last 6 months or so:
- According to the 2022 Jamstack Survey “Web Components have arrived” (jamstack.org)
- Brad Frost talks about web components (bradfrost.com)
- Safari is prototyping Declarative Shadow DOM (github.com)
- Element Internals is under development in Safari (github.com)
- Webkit turned on Constructable/Adopted Stylesheets (github.com)
- Eleventy introduced WebC … which isn’t capital-”WC” Web Components, but shares a similar ethos
- Enhance.dev is a whole framework built on web components
- Web Components Community Group collected their list of top concerns for TPAC
Exciting times. When I filmed my course, these more advanced Web Component concepts (Declarative Shadow DOM, Element Internals, Adopted Stylesheets, etc) were a smidge depressing to talk about because of their unknown Safari status. I could say the technology existed, but provide no roadmap for when it would get better support. But, if I’m reading these standards positions right, hopefully the consumer branch of Safari will support them soon.
On top of more feature support, more tooling is also great news for Web Components. Alternate takes, different ideas, varied perspectives! While it can cause some confusion when navigating the Web Component waters, the more perspectives the better for these little building blocks.